Our Salesforce Value Realization series has looked at strategies to set up loan officers (LOs) for success on Salesforce—specifically by giving them purpose-built tools to make sense of the rich customer and prospect data captured in Salesforce, then put it into action. Co-marketing is typically the most important lead-gen channel for LOs, making it a key focus for driving LO adoption of Salesforce. The questions are: How can you help less-experienced LOs build healthy referral networks, and how can you help more-experienced LOs efficiently manage their existing co-marketing relationships?
Once again, the critical strategy is layering on a vertical-specific toolset built to integrate with the horizontal Salesforce platform, to help LOs automatically pull out CRM data to make it actionable and usable.
Why co-marketing support is critical for Salesforce adoption
Veteran LOs may hate to admit it, but most homebuyers’ first call isn’t to an LO; it’s to a real estate agent. Right or wrong, most people think about finding the perfect home before they think about paying for it.
We should give real estate agents a little credit, too: from bus benches and billboards to sponsoring community events and other grassroots outreach, real estate agents are some of the most proficient marketers out there.
As the old saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Joining forces in co-marketing relationships creates a powerful, natural synergy that enhances value for the homebuyer while providing long-term growth opportunities for LOs. In fact, most LOs already get the majority of their referrals through partnerships with real estate agents.
Through Total Expert’s integration with Salesforce, LOs can begin managing co-marketing relationships with real estate partners. This goes beyond just managing a contact record in Salesforce. It means partnering with realtors within the Total Expert platform when it comes to building out marketing materials as they grow their presence in local markets. It also means properly splitting costs with those partners when producing rate and listing flyers to ensure they are complying with RESPA requirements.
Fortunately, Total Expert helps take LOs tackle one of the biggest challenges (and pains) of co-marketing: the time-consuming process of creating and managing all the materials that make a co-marketing relationship successful. From flyers, leave-behinds, and single-property websites, we’ll take the hassle out of managing your co-marketing relationships and all the associated materials.
Here’s how Total Expert’s purpose-built functionality can help LOs make the most of Salesforce:
Leverage a library of high-quality co-marketing templates
LOs aren’t graphic designers. They shouldn’t be spending their time creating open house flyers. At best, it takes time away from direct customer interactions. At worst, it’s actually hurting the co-marketing partnership—leading to inconsistent and low-quality marketing materials.
Total Expert gives LOs immediate access to a wide library of templates for co-marketing materials: open house flyers, rate flyers, and other materials to create a complete and cohesive co-marketing package. LOs get substantial time back while lending organizations get the peace of mind and protection of pre-built templates that are fully RESPA-compliant, with functionality that makes it easy and intuitive to split costs with referral partners.
Create custom single-property sites with point-and-click workflows
Homebuyers increasingly expect the convenience of single-property websites where they can find all the relevant info on a listing. But LOs also aren’t web designers. And they shouldn’t have to engage an expensive vendor just to create a single-property website.
LOs can use Total Expert’s pre-built site templates—with point-and-click, drag-and-drop workflows—to quickly customize a site that pulls in pre-configured data feeds such as a property’s historical valuation and forecasted appreciation, key neighborhood data, and more. Adding a lead form to the site automatically funnels contact data back into Salesforce to feed Total Expert’s insight-triggered lead nurture journeys.
Automatically pull in the right information
Because Total Expert’s integrates directly with 90% of the MLS providers, we’re able to quickly populate co-marketing materials and single-property websites with property descriptions and photos, ensuring accuracy for LOs and their partners. Additional integrations with Great! Schools powered by Google provide listing flyers with local information relevant to potential home buyers.
By automating this type of data collection, LOs can put a greater focus on developing relationships with their potential customers and real estate partners while delivering best-in-class materials that drive deeper engagement and higher conversions.
Track results with automated dashboards
The reality is that not all co-marketing partnerships are worth LOs’ time. On the other hand, some are particularly fruitful. The challenge is effectively (and quickly) differentiating the high-and low-performing relationships, to properly allocate time.
When your LOs create co-marketing materials and websites through Total Expert, relevant lead generation and performance data is automatically aggregated and populated into a co-marketing dashboard view. LOs can easily see which referral relationships are producing the results they want, so they can invest time and resources accordingly.
Give LOs the tools to be agents’ best friends
Giving LOs purpose-built co-marketing tools offers needed guidance to less-experienced LOs and valuable time-savings to more experienced LOs. But on a broader level, the ability to easily and efficiently create a complete package of high-quality, customized co-marketing materials makes an LO an even more valuable partner for busy, successful real estate agents.
Empowered with these purpose-built, vertical-specific capabilities that layer seamlessly on top of the Salesforce CRM, your LOs can confidently take on the responsibility of creating co-marketing collateral—building and fostering these vital referral channels to bring new leads into their pipeline.
